According to the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, “Television has brought murder back into the home — where it belongs.”

Ira Levin’s comedy-thriller “Deathtrap,” currently running at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pa., through July 13, provides the same kind of suspense, thrills, irony and mayhem that were Hitchcock’s specialties in films and on TV for five decades, and the play’s action happens in Hitchcock’s desired domestic locale.

The home where Levin’s mayhem explodes is in Westport, Conn., and belongs to dramatist Sidney Bruhl (played by Saxon Palmer), once the toast of Broadway for his clever thrillers beginning with one called “The Murder Game,” but now he’s suffering from a decided writer’s block brought on by having four Broadway flops in a row.

When he was in his prime, beginning 18 years ago, Bruhl attracted the eye of a wealthy woman named Myra (Angela Pierce), and since he has hit his lengthy dry spell, they’ve been living on his meager teaching salary from a local college and her considerable inheritance.

Sidney seems desperate for a hit to restore his reputation and self-confidence, and he mentions to Myra that Clifford Anderson (Raviv Ullman), a student in his playwriting class, has written a sure-fire mystery and sent it to him for his criticism.

Sidney seems desperate enough, to nervous Myra’s horror, to carry out his threat to murder Clifford in order to get that play. Sidney proclaims that Clifford’s thriller, titled “Deathtrap,” is so good that “even a gifted director couldn’t hurt it,” and Myra agrees reluctantly to help Sidney persuade Clifford to offer him co-authorship in return for his suggestions and supervision of the final draft.

That’s three of the people in the play’s character lineup, and the other two are Helga ten Dorp (Marcia Mason, fresh from her acclaimed direction of “Chapter Two” at BCP), Sidney’s neighbor and a Dutch psychic, and Porter Milgrim (David Wohl), Sidney’s close friend and lawyer.

Only two of the play’s five characters survive, and neither director Evan Cabnet nor actor Ullman, both in their first appearances at BCP, would say a word about who gets slaughtered or how.

“It would be criminal to write about that and spoil all the surprises,” Cabnet says. “Presenting them so that they really are surprises and include an element of shock as well as be an erroneous aspect of what the audience assumes it already knows, can be really challenging.”

Cabnet longs to direct the now-forgotten plays of Preston Sturgess, a goal encouraged by years as a fan of his films.

“It’s my first thriller, but it’s also a comedy, so I want to honor both styles,” Cabnet says. “That’s sometimes easier to do than it sounds. Many of the lines and situations, since they are in-jokes about theatrical life or about the art and craft of mystery writing, will mean more to some people than to others, but there are enough other funny bits based on characterizations and situations to keep it all bubbling along.

“The trick is to realize that what we know about these characters is what they want to present, and that’s not necessarily the reality of either these people or of their complex situation,” says Cabnet, who recently earned a sheaf of excellent reviews for the sold-out New York revival of Donald Margulies’ menacing play “The Model Apartment.”

Cabnet pointed out that the original 1978 Broadway production ran for 1,799 performances, making it one of the longest-running non-musicals in modern theater and that playwright Levin, who lists the best-seller “Rosemary’s Baby” among his many credits, is a true master of the literary genre that both Sidney and Clifford would like to represent .

“I’m walking in to an established hit, but I want it to be just as fresh and exciting an experience to newer audiences as it was when it proved itself all those years ago,” Cabnet says.

Ullman is delighted to be introduced to New Hope, BCP, this play and his first truly adult role. He’s been acting since childhood in such Broadway productions as the 1997 revival of “The King and I,” and his many TV credits include two seasons as the title character on the Disney Channel’s popular series “Phil of the Future,” using the stage name Ricky Ullman.

He finds Clifford a truly interesting character and warns audiences to keep an open mind about who Clifford is and what he’s eventually planning. He urges audience members not to jump to any obvious conclusions about either Clifford or Sidney, whom he sees as “certainly equals when it comes to scheming.”

“On the surface, he seems kind of wide-eyed and excited by the project of creating a play, but that’s not all there is,” Ullman says.

“He’s more than just an earnest young man, but the audience should be prepared for a character who has more layers than the obvious one he presents when he arrives as Sidney’s house.”